President calls for ‘new world order’ for international peace

President Dr Arif Alvi has urged the need to shun destructive security paradigms and doctrines in international relations and employ a world order based on rules, morality and ethics for international peace and making the world a better place for everyone.

He said that doctrines such as the “Mutually Assured Destruction, Humane Warfare, and cold war” mentality should be done away with and replaced with a philosophy of total peace.

The president expressed these views while addressing a special session of the “Margalla Dialogue, an interactive and policy-driven discussion, on the theme of “Navigating the Great Power competition: Developing World Perspective”, organised by the Islamabad Policy Research Institute, in Islamabad on Thursday. The session was attended by diplomats, foreign dignitaries, members of the academia and intelligentsia.

Addressing the session, the president said that destructive philosophies and ideas needed to be replaced with the philosophy of total peace where resorting to war was not an option.

This, he said, was possible when all nations and nation-states and people living in them were treated with dignity, honour and respect without any discrimination based on colour, creed, race or language.

He said that the principle of giving preferred status to some nations in the form of veto power should have no place in the new world order which, based on experience, had the potential to be misused to bring misery and war to less powerful nations.

Dr Alvi said that the world powers had been pursuing the doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction”, “Humane Warfare” and the “Cold War”, where every nation was producing lethal and dangerous weapons having the ability to destroy the entire world many times over by investing precious resources.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 18^th, 2022.